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Thursday, July 23, 2015

Study: Reading Interventions Make Big Impacts, Even Outside of English Class

By
Wills Citty

A
new College of Education study shows teaching struggling students reading
strategies through U.S. history class can improve both reading skills and
understanding of the subject itself.

The study,
published in the journal Exceptional Children, was conducted in
partnership with researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
It looked at the effects of targeted reading intervention for eighth grade
history students who read well below grade level. Half of the students in
the study were English language learners, and half received special education
services.

Over
the course of the 15-week study, participants in some cases made significant
gains through comparatively low-impact support.

A new study shows that reading intervention works.

“Struggling
readers who received just 5-15 minutes of daily direct, interactive vocabulary
instruction were able to define more academic vocabulary words than their
average performing peers who received incidental instruction from the classroom
teacher,” said study co-author Dr. Kristen Beach, who spoke on behalf of the
UNC Charlotte contingent.

Beach, an assistant professor in the Department
of Special Education and Child Development, and departmental colleague Dr. Lindsay Flynn helped
develop the program. The pair trained classroom teachers on reading techniques
and documented the results of their deployment in the classroom.

Students were taught the meanings of academic terms, how to
break down complicated words, and critically for history class, to understand
cause-and-effect relationships.

“The
cause-effect text structure is among the most important for readers to
understand in history, since history is often defined by sequenced and
causally-connected events. Unfortunately, the cause-effect text structure is
also among the most difficult for struggling readers to grasp,” said Beach.

After
learning strategies to identify and organize cause-effect relationships,
struggling readers performed as well as average performing peers on a task that
required picking out cause and effect in a new passage, the study found.

Integrating
reading instruction into classes other than English may thus be a real answer
for students without the foundational skills to succeed; on the other hand,
doing so may also be a source of consternation for teachers dealing with
limited resources.

Beach
noted that while most instructors came to recognize the value of integrating
reading instruction into their history class, at first some were skeptical
about dedicating time to non-core material.

However,
“the decision to teach reading skills
or subject-area content isn’t necessarily a catch-22,” Beach said, “In fact,
infusing instruction on word reading, vocabulary, and text structure into
content area classrooms can be feasible and is often at harmony with content
area teachers’ goals: to teach content knowledge and critical thinking skills.”

The numbers back up that argument.

Study participants improved by an average 20 points
in teacher-created history finals. That’s a striking statistic, Beach said.

“These improvements are particularly impressive
given [our study’s] instruction supplanted the teacher’s typical instruction
and did focus more on strategies for reading rather than on instruction to improve
content area knowledge.”

The study was
a cooperative effort between university scholars and the middle school teachers
who agreed to participate. Researchers and teachers met throughout to talk
about which strategies worked and which didn’t. And tactics were modified and
improved base on these review sessions.

“Our goal was to design instruction that was
effective, manageable, and complimentary with teachers’ existing classroom
goals and practices. By doing so, we maximized the likelihood that the
resulting intervention would be sustained in the school building after our
particular study ended,” Beach said.

The broad based reading strategies employed in the
study are part of preservice special education teacher training at UNC
Charlotte. In response to educator
feedback, Beach and study co-author Flynn are working with a College of Education
colleague to develop a program that teaches class-specific reading skills.

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